Category: History –  Page 4

“I Don’t Know Why I Killed Him But I Did”

The true story of Earnest Pletch is hard to believe, even almost a hundred years later. Commonly referred to as America’s first hijack, I’m not sure where else there might have been an earlier one. Also, I think it should technically be referred to as in-flight theft of an aircraft, I guess, not to mention…

Read more… 14 Apr 17

Kaleva Shot Down By Long Range Bombers

Today is the 99th anniversary of Estonian independence. Sadly, that doesn’t mean 99 years of independence. The auspicious date seems like a good opportunity for a historical post covering the most famous aviation incident in Estonian territory: when the Finnish passenger plane Kaleva was shot down by Soviet bombers as it was departing Tallinn. Kaleva…

Read more… 24 Feb 17

The Mystery of Flying Tiger Line flight 739

On the 16th of March, 1962, a Lockheed Super Constellation airliner disappeared over the Pacific. The Flying Tiger Line was the first scheduled cargo airline in the US. It was named after the Flying Tigers fighter unit, a World War II group of pilots from the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps whose shark-faced fighter…

Read more… 30 Sep 16

Disaster at the Air Show

ONE OF THE MOST tragic accidents in recent history is hard to reach concrete conclusions about because there are no published investigation results and no final report to be read. The accident took place at Sknyliv Airport, near Lviv in the Ukraine, in July 2002. Fourteen years later, the local community has still not recovered.…

Read more… 5 Aug 16

Wrong Way Corrigan mistakes Ireland for California

The story of how Douglas Corrigan ended up in Ireland while aiming for California is one of my favourites. In fact, I feel sure that I’ve written about him before*. It was seventy-eight years ago, the 17th of July in 1938, when Douglas Corrigan earned the nickname “Wrong Way Corrigan”. He started his aviation career…

Read more… 22 Jul 16

The first supersonic jet bomber

This week, I am away camping in rainy North Wales. However, my friend Tatiana works for Picryl (https://picryl.com), a cross-platform application to find traces of history in photos, rare and ancient books, photos, posters and postcards in hundreds of sources like Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, and NASA. Tatiana is an aviation geek too…

Read more… 24 Jun 16

Accident Reports

Explosive Decompression on the Ground

The Gulfstream G150, a twin-engine business jet, arrived at Kittilä airport in Lapland on a cold Tuesday afternoon on the 2nd of January 2018, carrying three crew and four passengers.…

I am the problem: PSA flight 1771

On the 7th of December in 1987, Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771 departed Los Angeles International for a scheduled passenger flight to San Francisco. There were five crew and thirty-eight…

Demystifying

Small Plane Gets Stoned

This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…

How do you pronounce…?

This is a very interesting article by Allen Amsbaugh which was originally published in NASA’s ASRS Directline about the issues of navigational fixes which sound or look similar. The ASRS…

History

The Last Flight of B121-120

The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…

Abused fighter planes and the men who love them

A few months ago, I wrote about how to shoot down a fighter jet while flying it, the case of a test-pilot in a Grumman F-11 Tiger who managed to…

Fun Stuff

Jetpacks and Wingwalking: 2020 keeps getting weirder

Twenty-twenty was always an interesting sounding year, popular with futurists and science fiction writers for having something of a ring to it, a year in which clean fuel and commercial…

Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Microsoft Flight Simulator has released a new version, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, fourteen years after the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The timing couldn’t be better, of course, with…